The Case of the Fallen Hero (An Inspector David Graham Cozy Mystery Book 3)

by Alison Golden

  “Yes, the death of…”

  “I know who died. And I know when. My mother told me.”

  “How?” Harding wanted to know.

  There was another fed-up teenager gesture, rolled eyes and a pouting mouth. “She knocked on the door,” Juliette said, as if explaining the situation to a child, “and said, ‘Juliette, George has fallen off the castle. He is dead.’ Then I went back to sleep.”

  Both officers were reading this young woman, her behavior, her accent, and her lack of any interest in helping them. Both were privately elevating her higher on their list of suspects.

  “Do you believe it possible that George committed suicide?” Harding asked.

  Another shrug. “People get sad. Maybe life with Marie wasn’t so perfect.”

  Graham got straight to the point. “Were you jealous of your sister?” Juliette’s eyes darted around to focus on him. “After all, he had been yours once.”

  There was a brief explosion of French. Harding recognized a couple of curses. Then Juliette said, “He was a nobody! Not even a real man.”

  Harding felt a new and genuine sympathy for George. She’d never imagined that the victim of a sudden and mysterious incident like this one should find himself so badly maligned by those who might be expected to mourn him. First Antoine and now Juliette. For a family into which he’d married not once but twice, at least two of the Jouberts appeared to have the lowest opinion of George Ross.

  “But yet you attended their wedding. Traveled here, booked a hotel, took a full part in the celebrations,” Graham reminded her.

  Juliette was surrounded by thick smoke, as though she were a conjurer whose trick had gone wrong, but she made no attempt to wave it away, apparently inured to this poisonous atmosphere. “I knew there would be free champagne.”

  “But your sister?” Harding added.

  “Is an idiot,” Juliette spat. “I told her what she was getting into, and she didn’t listen. She never listens. We haven’t had a proper conversation in years.”

  “What was she getting into, Ms. Paquet?”

  Graham used the silence that followed to take stock. In the end, he boiled his thoughts down to a single question: “Juliette, can I ask what you think happened to George?”

  One more shrug. Did it mean I don’t know, or perhaps, I don’t care? He felt it might be a mixture of the two. She’d shown no grief for George’s loss, no sympathy for her sister, only a contempt for the emotions that always swirled around a sudden death. It was as if she’d been here a hundred times and was simply bored of it all.

  “Maybe he was drunk and leaning over the side,” Juliette pondered. “Or maybe he slipped. I have no idea. You’re the detectives,” she said, lighting up another cigarette. “You figure it out.”

  Graham paced around on the patio terrace of the White House Inn, waiting for Constable Roach to pick up his blessed phone. He gratefully filled his lungs with fresh afternoon air. It had been a long time since he’d been in so smoky an environment as Juliette’s room, and he knew the smell would linger on his clothes and – much worse – his skin, until he could shower.

  “Constable Roach, I’m going to listen for a brief moment while you tell me that your missing persons case is concluded.”

  “Ah,” Roach began. “Erm.”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Roach,” Graham muttered. “We need to interview twenty more wedding guests. I’m up to my ears in Gallic disinterest and sociopathic siblings. I need some good news. Lay it on me.”

  Roach explained the situation, none too proud of their having come up short, but unable to improve on the reality. “We’ve turned the place upside down, sir. No one’s seen them, and they’re not in any of the basement hallways.”

  Uncharacteristically, but in a moment that spoke of the stress and confusion of the day, Graham unleashed a brief, colorful torrent of vernacular.

  “You alright, sir?” Roach asked.

  Graham took six long breaths, so deep and determined that Roach heard every single one. Then the tired, frustrated DI said, “Constable Roach, I need several things in short order. I need a pot of tea so badly that I’d threaten Mrs. Taylor with a loaded gun if she told me that the kitchen had run out of Oolong. I need,” he continued, “the witnesses to do a bit more bloody witnessing and the family to be a damned sight more familial.” Roach knew venting when he heard it, and he stood quietly, phone to ear, letting his boss get things off his chest. “I need the esteemed Marcus Tomlinson to get back to me with something more concrete than, ‘Sorry, DI Graham, this bloke’s dead, and I don’t know why.’ And,” he pushed on, “I need my crack team of missing persons experts to find some bloody missing people!”

  “Roger that, sir,” Roach could only say.

  “Get on with it,” Graham told him. “I hope there remains not an iota of confusion as to what I need from you, son.”

  “None, sir.”

  Click.

  CHAPTER 10

  MARINA CRADLED LEO in her lap and made him as comfortable as she could. Harry’s sweater – donned that morning in case the castle inner hallways were chilly – made a serviceable blanket, but they were very short of other ways to keep him warm.

  “I’m telling you,” Marina kept saying, “I heard something.”

  Harry alternated between kneeling, concerned about the stricken Leo, and trying to bolster the improvised staircase from which his friend had fallen. “All I heard,” Harry said honestly, “was Leo yelling because he’d just fractured his arm.”

  Emily was never one to let sloppy summations slip by. “You’re not a doctor, and we don’t know what’s happened to his arm.” The stress of their predicament was getting to them all. Tempers were beginning to fray.

  “Okay, okay, let’s keep calm,” Leo pained voice rose up out of the darkness. It was almost the first thing he’d managed to say since falling, twenty minutes earlier, except to repeatedly apologize for making their already bad situation markedly worse.

  But Marina was adamant. “It sounded like someone shouting from out there,” she said, nodding toward the pile of rocks that was all that remained of the tunnel through which they’d arrived.

  Emily shrugged, unwilling to rule anything out. “Point is, we didn’t reply.”

  “We were a little distracted,” Harry said defensively, motioning to Leo’s arm. It was lying across his chest in what had become the least painful position. “I thought he was out cold,” he added. In the moments after Leo’s fall and before light could be brought to where he had landed, it had indeed seemed that Leo was knocked unconscious. In the end, he was simply stunned. Leo had taken a long moment to realize what had happened, by which time Marina was already attending to his arm.

  “Well, even if they are looking for us down here, I say we continue to try getting over into the next chamber,” Harry said.

  But Emily remained unconvinced. “There’s no guarantee that the next chamber is any improvement on this one. Or that we could get Leo over the wall.”

  “We wouldn’t have to,” Marina told her, “if Harry could find a way out and get help.”

  There seemed no reason to debate any further. Emily, still full of misgivings, inspected Harry’s “staircase,” which was only a slightly more secure version of the rock pile Leo had climbed. “One foothold after another,” she advised. “Super slow and careful.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Harry quipped as he began his ascent. The augmented rock pile would take him a little higher than the point Leo had managed to reach, which should, he hoped, make the job of levering himself into the next chamber rather easier. What would happen on the other side, of course, no one could say. But Emily insisted that Harry agree to return if no safe way down into the chamber presented itself.

  They waited as he steadily made his way up the pile of rocks, using carefully built footholds and finding it much easier to keep a grip than Leo had done. One of their three cellphones was now below twenty percent power, so Emily held it in reserve and used
hers to light Harry’s way. He had the other, and she hoped it would reveal some kind of good news.

  “Okay, I’ve got a good grip on the top,” he said, reaching the jagged gap where the wall of the chamber had crumbled, revealing the way into the neighboring room. “Here goes.”

  Harry hauled himself up so that the top of the wall, two bricks thick and noticeably shoddily made, was under his belly, and paused there. “Hey… You know what?”

  “You okay?” Emily called up.

  “There’s a big pile,” Harry called back, his voice constrained by his curious embrace of the wall, “of boxes in here.”

  Marina and Emily exchanged a glance. Leo had his eyes closed but was obviously listening. “What kind?” Emily shouted back.

  “Wooden,” came the reply. “Big, solid things.”

  “Is there a way out? How does the rest of the room look?” Marina was desperate to know.

  “Like…” Harry began, and then pulled himself further over, so that he could reach down and brace himself against one of the boxes. “You remember… the end of that movie?”

  “Which movie?”

  “Indiana Jones,” Harry replied, levering himself fully over the wall now and standing straight up on the uppermost wooden storage box. The pile must have been ten feet high, perhaps more. “You know, the huge room full of wooden boxes where they store the Ark of the Covenant? Bloody good movie.”

  Emily and Marina exchanged another glance. “Sure,” Emily humored him.

  “That’s what it looks like in here,” Harry said, shining his cellphone light around the chamber. “Dozens of them. In stacks, against the walls.” He looked around, then down. “I think I can get down to the floor.”

  “Okay,” Emily called through. Their voices were noticeably harder to discern through the wall of the chamber, and she found herself nearly screaming at him. “Just go slowly and watch your footing.”

  Harry didn’t reply but was grateful to find the way down very easy. Within moments, he’d stepped down from the pile of boxes and was in the middle of the room. Above him, he noticed, was a single light bulb suspended from the ceiling. “There might even be a light in here. Hang on.”

  Miraculously, in perhaps the best news they’d had since the rock fall, hours earlier, the light still worked. “Eureka!” he cried. “I haven’t seen a door yet, but this place is pretty interesting. Wonder what’s in these boxes?”

  “Markings,” Leo said quietly.

  “Any markings on them?” Marina related, grateful now for her voice coaching lessons. She’d taken them originally to help her with speaking to audiences during concerts, but now found they were excellent preparation for vocal projection in underground chambers. Who knew?

  Harry put away the cellphone and took a close look at the nearest boxes. “This one says ‘E.E.R.’”, he said. “The font looks a bit familiar. I think I’ve seen that in a movie, too. Oh, wait…” There was a pause.

  “Harry?” Marina yelled. The only response was a creaking sound, something like wood being broken. “Harry, I’m serious, if you release mustard gas or start a nuclear chain reaction in there, we’ll have words later, I promise you.”

  The voice that came back was not at all jocular. “I think you need to come over here.”

  “Seriously?” Emily said.

  “Yes,” Harry confirmed. “All of you.”

  “But Leo…” Marina objected.

  “Him too,” Harry told them. “Find a way, and do it right now.”

  To the relief of the whole quartet, the journey into the next chamber was not nearly as awkward and painful as Leo had feared. First conquering his apprehension of once more ascending their improvised staircase, Leo then found a way to shuffle through the gap at the top of the wall, where Marina and Harry received him and made sure he suffered no further injury.

  “Top man,” Harry said. “Sorry to make you go through all that, but I believe you’ll thank me in a moment.”

  The room was perhaps twenty feet wide and twenty-five feet long, larger than where they had come from, and well lit, for a change. Against all four walls were large stacks of wooden crates, each marked with the same three letters, E.E.R. Initial speculation about whether this might be connected to Queen Elizabeth was dampened by the font. It was as German as it could possibly have been, exactly the stereotypical Teutonic script.

  “Jesus, Harry,” Emily said, making her way down the final level of boxes and arriving on the floor with a short jump. “This could be a haul of secret weapons or poison or something…”

  “No,” Harry said. “It most certainly isn’t poisonous. Or dangerous.” He paused, enjoying the moment. “Unless, of course, it’s the late nineteen thirties, and you’re concerned about its potential influence on German culture.”

  “Eh?” Emily responded, but then turned to see the opened crate. Harry had unearthed its contents, removed the curtain-like packing material, and displayed the three unframed paintings, propping them up by the case in which they’d remained hidden for at least seventy years.

  Marina said it. “What,” she began slowly, “the heck…”

  “Franz Lipp,” Leo told them proudly. “Austrian, born around eighteen ninety, if memory serves.” With his good arm, he ushered the others out of his light and took a close look. “Oh, yes,” Leo grinned. “It’s him, for certain. Look at these brush strokes. The confidence of an artist in his prime. And the colors,” he pointed out, “vibrant, but serene.” Undimmed by the years, the painting was a composite of arching, looping swathes, purple and green, invoking a pastoral scene, perhaps, with the whirl of a passing storm in the background. “He was Jewish, but before Hitler made his little power grab in nineteen thirty-three, Lipp’s works found their way into some of Europe’s finest collections. Including,” he added meaningfully, “that of the Rosenberg family.”

  There was silence as the others struggled to understand. “Leo,” Emily said, transfixed by the painting. “What exactly is going on here?”

  Leo continued, full of energy now. “These other two are probably his as well. Although this one,” he said, pointing to the smallest canvas, “might be by a student. Or it could be Lipp’s earlier work. See how it’s a little more pedantic, more obvious; here’s a harbor and here’s a boat… While in his later works, his style became so much more fluid and amorphous.”

  “’Degenerate art,’” Marina breathed. “The kind of paintings that were unacceptable in the Third Reich. The modernists, Cubists, Surrealists… Can you imagine that Picasso was illegal?”

  Emily was flabbergasted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She looked around the spartan chamber, here in the deepest basement of a castle in the Channel Islands. “Here? Of all places?”

  Harry shrugged. “Why not? The Germans knew that the British wouldn’t bother invading, and that air raids or naval bombardment would only endanger the beleaguered public.”

  Her mind working at full speed, Marina said, “Wait, we never defended the island against the Germans? We just left the people here under Nazi occupation?”

  Harry had read about the islands before leaving London and had a ready answer. “Couldn’t be done. The Germans were pretty well dug in, and it would have been a horrendous job to boot them out. Besides,” he added, “the strategic importance of the islands was pretty limited. The Germans occupied Jersey virtually unimpeded. So, this was as safe a place as any to store forbidden art works.”

  “Perhaps,” Leo continued, “to sell after the war, or trade for more desirable works, as they so often did.”

  “Desirable?” Emily asked, taking a closer look at the paintings. “These are amazing.”

  “To us, sure,” Leo said. “But to a Nazi, these symbolized the breakdown in traditional art forms, and everything that was wrong with twentieth-century society. Not to mention the fact that the artist was Jewish. I’m a little surprised, and very relieved, that they weren’t simply burned, along with so many others.”

  “Remarkable
,” Harry intoned. Then he recognized the potential scope of their find. “Say, do you think all of these crates are full of confiscated art?”

  Emily grinned, despite herself. Usually their level-headed leader, she was now as caught up in the moment as the others. “Dunno,” she said. “But, I say we find out!”

  CHAPTER 11

  EVENTS BOTH LARGE and small had done much to undermine Detective Inspector David Graham’s enduring belief in a benevolent God, but a well-timed and perfectly-brewed pot of Oolong did much to reaffirm it. How, he speculated as he poured his third cup with a steady hand, could such an extraordinary and healthful tonic be available to humanity, except through the guidance of a loving Creator?

  Sergeant Janice Harding spotted his mood. “Thinking big thoughts?” she asked as she sat down. After a hectic day, she’d taken the time to grab her spare uniform back at the station, and was now at her resplendent best, her hair neatly tied back and eyes sparkling.

  “Just putting some more fuel in the tank,” Graham told her. “I suspect our day’s work is far from finished.”

  Harding related something she had recently read. “The chances of an interviewee either forgetting something or embellishing the truth increase exponentially roughly twelve hours after the events in question.”

  Graham nodded.

  “No eyewitness testimony can ever be regarded as one hundred percent accurate,” Graham told her, “because we’re relying on frail and fragile human beings.”

  “Makes you wish there were cameras everywhere,” Harding offered. “It would cut crime in half.”

  Sipping his tea, Graham briefly thought this over, but having worked in London for so long, this topic was a well-trodden path. “At what cost?”

  Harding replied, “They’re not all that expensive, are they? And the information could cut down on investigative work and interviews, save us a ton of money…”

  Graham raised a hand to bring her to a halt. “Police work is not,” he said very seriously, “and never will be some kind of video game where you click a few buttons and suddenly you’ve got your suspect.”